I'm relatively new to WPF and MVVM and the hardest thing I have found is how to simply switch a usercontrol or a view in an application.
In winforms, to have a control remove itself you would simple say this.Parent.Controls.Remove(this);
In WPF there is no generic Parent control, you would have to typecast it to the specific type (i.e. Grid) and then remove it.
This also seems to break the MVVM architecture. I have also tried data templates and content presenters, which work well, except for the fact that I can't change the datacontext from code, since the datacontext is always the viewmodellocator.
Are pages the acceptable way to do this in WPF now? What if I had a grid with a custom usecontrol and I wanted to switch it based on some variable in the viewModel? It seems like the simplest tasks cannot be accomplished easily in WPF.